I'm a professional scavenger making a living selling curbside garbage. This blog details my finds and sales. It also acts as an archive for things beautiful and historic that would otherwise have been destroyed.

Day of plenty pt.2

Here’s the first pile from that especially productive day. As you can see it was quite the mound and it took a while to sort through! I met the lady putting it out and she seemed nice enough, asking me not to make a mess “because she had enough of one inside” (or something along those lines). These folks were clearly well off, and I came away with a huge pile of quality junk. Some was eBay worthy, but a lot of it will end up in the yard sale pile.

I did large groupings for the photos due the sheer quantity of things to document. As a result, you’ll have to zoom in to get a good look! That iPhone was a now vintage 3, I sold it for 15$ at a recent sale. It’s always fun to find things that are useful for the business, such as those bubble envelopes and markers. Those Dolceroma frames are the first of several nice pairs I found, most of which will appear in the next several photos. These ones are handmade in Italy, though the company doesn’t seem to be that well known in North America.

Here we have some pennies, an Apple trackpad, a Palm Tungsten PDA, a bag of yarn, lots of photo paper, and plenty more quality junk.

I found lots of useful wires, including one for a MacBook Pro (unfortunately, I never found the actual computer). The Western Digital thing is some kind of streaming device.

Nothing too exciting here, just a lot of useful stuff! Those Hugo Boss colognes should sell for a bit though.

There’s a couple of pretty nice eyeglass frames here. At the bottom right are some handcrafted wooden frames made by a German company named Rolf. They’re fairly expensive, and mine just sold for 100$. The frames above are by Paul Smith, I expect them to sell for around 50$. The watch is a vintage Enicar, nice but not super fancy. It’s probably worth about 50$ as well. The red box on top is a never opened Yi home camera, which seems to go for around 35$. At top left is an 2gb Apple Time Machine.

Lots of electronic stuff in this pic! I should be able to make decent money from that iPod Touch near the bottom right, as well as the Nintendo 64 games at the top right. Most of the rest will go into the yard sale pile.

But the most notable finds from this spot were the gift cards. It seems that the lady had a son who regularly received them as gifts. He didn’t much care for them by the look of things – above is a long expired (when that was still legal) 50$ gift card from Renaud-Bray, a local bookstore.

That was just a sign of things to come. I also found a Starbucks gift card, and when I checked online I discovered that it still contained 100$! There’s a Starbucks a few minutes from my house, so over the past few weeks I’ve appreciated the gift more than the kid ever did. I’m actually there right now, using up the last of the money writing this post.

That’s not the end of the gift cards, however. I also saved a Banana Republic card containing 100$ and a Renaud-Bray containing 25$. There was a HMV card as well but they’ve since gone out of business… oh well! I guess I’ll be buying some pants and books. This is the first time I’ve found unused gift cards in the trash. I’ve saved a few previously, including one with 63$ on it, but at least those were lightly used.

The garbage has been flowing lately, though none of the finds are going to single handedly make me rich. Ville St Laurent’s heavy garbage day was productive on Sunday night, providing three big bags of vintage clothes, a cute melamine kitchen table, and some old unidentified tools. Last night’s run provided vintage Rusty Staub (RIP Le Grand Orange) era Montreal Expos publications and some quality audio equipment. My best run last week was in TMR, but I’ll share what I found there in a future post.

I’ve picked up gift cards too–never more than 5 dollars and some change, on the ground in front of the store they’re from; seems people don’t want to be bothered with carrying them until they spend that last little bit–some was for fast food, some was grocery money. And last wk it was a dollar bill on the side of the road, obviously washed there in the rain and coated in grease/mud–but I’ll take it. What people throw down, what they throw out, what they won’t bother to pick up if they drop it—It must be nice to have so much money that being bothered isn’t an option…..

You’ve got a real mishmash of stuff and things there. Your yard sales are anything but boring. Something for everyone, as the saying goes. 🙂 Hope you find lots more unused Starbucks cards … it’s a great place to do your writing.

Absolutely love your site! Regarding the expired gift cards a number of companies will honor their expired gift cards although they may say they require a fee – usually in the amount around 25%. Better than nothing, I think. Also, the gift card for the business that no longer exists, some competitors will take the card although they sometimes won’t give the full amount. This has happened several times.

On another topic, I just read in a national magazine that several shops have now opened that sell predominately expired perfumes/colognes. The shop they seemed to talk about most was actually in France and the owner had just opened a shop in New York. He is always on the lookout for new sources. Apparently, some perfumes age well and people actually like the way the perfume smells after a few years. Some perfumes don’t change hardly at all. I thought this was extremely interesting as I had never before heard such a thing. So, don’t undersell those smell goods.

Good to know, I’ll keep that in mind for the future. It makes sense that there are now stores for that, vintage perfume is a big market and there aren’t many places (save for eBay) that serve that niche.

I love seeing your posts and the gift cards were such an exciting find! I don’t even bother with gift cards now. If I think the recipient will apply the funds to a certain store, I still give them cash. At least they won’t throw out cold, hard cash (hope not). It’s college move out season here in the States.Perfect for sniffing out unwanted textbooks (my area of interest) but also lamps, rugs, unopened food, wastepaper baskets, school supplies, shampoo and double packs of deodorant (because parents somehow think there’s no access to these things when we have three pharmacies within walking distance of our local college). Last year I found a Vera Bradley wallet with change and a Starbucks gift card. Think that was only for $5.

Yes I don’t particularly like gift cards as a gift anyways, unless it’s to a place you’re frequent regularly. It’s basically like giving cash, but with conditions. One thing’s for sure, between the expiry dates (now illegal) and the unused balances the companies are making a killing selling them.

Most of my gift card finds have been under 10$, except these two and the 63$ one from last year.

I agree with you, although I do still buy gift cards to Starbucks and Target for my kids’ teachers for gifts.

Textbooks are the very best thing to find at the college move outs. This time around I found a textbook worth $105.50 on Amazon trade-in! I found one unused Chipotle card with $25 on it at the “Greek” housing complex. We’ll put that to good use. I find a lot of all of the things you listed, often brand-new or nearly-new. I always hope that they didn’t purchase the stuff on student loans only to throw it out unused.

Hi,Martin,the people who post on your blog are so right,just like you are.Craigslist Canada has removed all personal ads 5 days ago.Craigslist had already removed erotic and escort ads many years ago.
A reader posted on your blog many weeks ago that Craigslist US was removing all personal ads.Now Craigslist Canada has done the same.
Kijiji does not allow personal ads .
Our freedoms are under threat because of the supposed fear of sex trafficking.

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